Hasty Pudding: notes and assorted paraphernalia

In his previous photographic work, Allan Hasty has evinced a decided Southern Gothic tendency. His images are replete with tabloid visions of sex, sleaze, sin and death, with B-girls in bustiers brandishing guns, with freaks and geeks. With portraits subjected to the choreographed flash of strobe lights, analyzing motion into a series of post-Eadweard Muybridge smears, tearing bodily into the fourth dimension. With memento mori awash in a sea of multimedia distress, the surface of the photo intentionally dirtied in its development from the negative. A photo from Solicitation, his last show at The Proposition in 2004, is representative of his penchant for the freakish and extreme, for his manipulation of the image, and for his peculiarly gothic obsessions.

Hasty’s stance is cutely subversive, self consciously sexualized, purposefully tawdry, perhaps even an antique (or occasionally hackneyed) take on the demimonde. He is not exactly Joel-Peter Witkin, but they seem to inhabit adjacent workbenches in the same abattoir. Were his Weltanschauung reified into the image of a rock band, we might be looking at The Cramps or The Butthole Surfers. And more than likely he subscribes to that old William Blake chestnut: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

His latest work, though, is a bit of a surprise, and not because he has lost his naughty edge, but rather due to his choice of a new medium. Here are ten paintings, silkscreen ink on canvas, each about four feet square and consisting of a monochrome field overlaid with a dense grid of screened images, logos familiar the street drug trade. Coke and dope, C&D, in their familiar little plastic bags, stamped with iconic brands like Batman, Bubble, Crown, Bulldog, Skull and Superman, representing the marketing efforts of some of New York's most upwardly mobile entrepreneurs. They label their merchandise for the same reasons that influence the “legitimate” commercial world, or the stacking of cans on your local supermarket shelf: for brand recognition; ease of identification and selection; specificity among competing labels; as a guarantee of particular taste or quality or potency; to foster customer loyalty; and to create a lasting, durable persona for their goods.

Hasty is decidedly not judgmental about the mileu he has chosen to depict. If anything, he is perhaps a bit too avid in embracing the lower depths, the lure of depravity. By now it is a given that capitalism is similar on all levels, whether it wears a suit and tie in the boardroom or baggy jeans and bling on the street corner. We all know the Mafia is organized, top down, just like a major corporation, and that corruption and greed are as prevalent (and perhaps even more dangerous, in the long run) in banks and mortgage houses as they are in Columbian drug cartels. Business is business. We are all complicit in its excesses, betrayed by its abuses, victimized by its blandishments, allured by its promises, swallowed up in its ability to co-opt.

A pertinent aside: This summer we seem to be remembering the golden age of East Village punk and New Wave, a decade (or so) from the late 70s to the late 80s, with a show at PPOW inspired by the work of David Wojnarowicz; a brief reunion of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, featuring Lydia Lunch, in conjunction with the publication of a book on the New York No Wave scene; the 20th anniversary of the Tompkins Square riots with the film Captured, centered on photographer Clayton Patterson, longtime chronicler of the Lower East Side. This period was also the flowering of the East Village gallery scene, and back in the day, there was a space on East Tenth Street (just down the block from Nature Morte) called Executive. The name was not a nod to yuppiedom, or a hopeful bid for entrée into a world of corporate polish; it was archly lifted from a local brand of dope.

Hasty was no stranger to the East Village scene. He certainly remembers those days of experimentation and excess, the heady flirtation with drugs and danger. And he has, apparently, been collecting and cataloging these bags of dope for many years, perhaps for curatorial purposes only. Or should we take him at his word: does he really want his candy? In any case, his method reveals a painstaking attention to craft and an assiduously handmade quality. He first photographs the logo off the bag, with all its smudges and imperfections intact, then enlarges the image, creating a single screen, which is used to print each element of the grid. So if you can count 63 logos in “Super”, be assured it required 63 individual pressings.

The regularity of the field suggests the regimen of pattern painting, while Hasty’s cover-the-canvas efforts might indicate an obsessive-compulsive disorder, perhaps even a bit of horror vacui. But we are not here to psychoanalyze, rather to enjoy the product. Each painting incorporates variations of pressure and application, peculiarities of accident and intention. It is these very variations – a lightening of the monochrome background in certain areas (as in Ed Ruscha), a slight torque of the logo from one pressing to the next - that delight the eye and keep it moving over the canvas, alert to nuance. Certainly, these works would be much less effective were they perfectly machined, fully uniform in color, repetitive in density and image. They would degenerate into mass production, mere posters on canvas. A very unsatisfying demonstration of an idée fixe.

In this sense, a comparison to Warhol is unavoidable: the use of silkscreens, of course, and the appropriation of pop imagery, in this case logos, which accesses Warhol's entire oeuvre, from the earliest 50s shoe ads to the Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes to the mid 80s collaborations with Basquiat. But there is also the idea of resolution and registration, or the lack of same, the process of degradation when an image is photographed, re-photographed, screened and then printed. Warhol embraced the artistic possibilities of “bad” printing: the fuzziness, off registration qualities, inexact outlines, uneven coloration and grain, blotches. He took these “errors” and made them the very subject of his art. Hasty is no slouch in this department. Take a look at “Lion” and feel free to roar in approval.

A final word, or rather two. “Demonic” is one useful description of the artist’s mindset (see below), but its close cousin, “demotic”, would not leave my mind. It also felt right, but I could not remember its meaning, so I looked it up. There are two definitions. The more common is “of the people, popular, vernacular”, and this certainly references Hasty’s selection of street corner branding. The second definition is more specific: “designating a simplified system of ancient Egyptian writing, distinguished from hieratic”, the latter being a script derived from hieroglyphics and used by priests in the temple. Now I had what I wanted: a perfect metaphor for Hasty’s new work. His paintings can be viewed as a simplified system of picture writing, built from commercial logos which march across the canvas in ordered rows, much like text on a page. But as they are decidedly secular, they are not hieroglyphs. They are Hasty’s hiply arch demotics.

Tom Fruin, a NY based sculptor who currently shows with Vanessa Buia, fashions his work from street detritus: discarded construction materials, old signs, pipes, derelict building fixtures, junk of all sorts, even cigarette packs and candy wrappers. But his signature medium, for several years, were those small baggies that serve as packaging for the street corner drug trade. This quilted piece is entitled Sediment: Alfred E. Smith (apparently named for the housing project where he scavenged his materials), found drug bags and thread, 69" X 78", 2001-2002. It was exhibited at the old DuMBO performance space, GAle GAtes Et Al.

thank you Mr. Kaplan for an insightful, intelligent and thought provoking article on the new work of Allan D. Hasty...
the gallery has, as a result, decided to keep the show open through Friday, August 15 (gallery hours: Tues-Fri 11-6)

Christopher Wool's work also came to mind as I looked at them in the gallery as well as one of my current favorites, Wade Guyton. Oh, and throw in Damien Hirst's drug cabinets and Philip Taaffe's repetitive images for good measure.

I liked them more as the images you posted, though, and that may be because the paintings basically illustrate a novel idea rather than creating, through the materials, a way for the viewer to experience that idea, which is the power behind Warhol's repetitive images. You sense a real obsession of an addict in his silkscreen paintings, at least the early ones. How he did it, exactly, I have no idea. Richard Prince manages to pull it off, too, making me feel a little sick for liking his work.

That said I look forward to seeing where he goes with them. They are certainly eye-catching but they don't, as yet, keep me caught long enough to show me something I don't already know.

Wolfie: Dude! Interesting use of the grid. Although I've never (to my knowledge) been branded on a bag of dope, glad you could enter into the spirit of things. Since you bring it up, the pic was taken years ago in Hamburg, a test shot for a cigarette billboard ad. Those white bricks in the background are German. The talent scout was a friend of a friend, and I was (surprisingly) recommended. I still smoked back then, and could have been famous for 15 minutes as the Peter Stuyvesant guy. But I didn't get the gig.

Would be interested in your comment on my previous waterboard post, assuming you do not again "torture" me with my own image. Note: a Google search under "waterboarding steve powers" brings up our site first, even before New York Magazine. Are we hooked into those cosmic Net forces, big W?

Murph: Interesting comparison with Chris Wool, although I believe he used stencils for the block text paintings that brought him early recognition, and paint rollers with relief patterns for a subsequent body of "wallpaper" work. Probably no silkscreening.

But when we talk about screened work with a repeated image or grid, the reference to Warhol is just about obligatory - although comparisons are odious. There is something about seriality, its rhyming structure, its dandified redundancy, even its slight built-in variegation (with roots in Minimalism, postMinimalism, Conceptualism, etc.) that I've always found supremely elegant as a strategy for art making. That is, when it is not just the quick fix of a lazy mind.

If I remember my art school training correctly, a silkscreen is a form of stencil. But maybe a better comparison is with Robert Gober's wallpaper with repeated images of a sleeping white man and a lynched black man. What I think I found lacking in the Hasty work is the leap between the drug packets and the painting hung on the wall. If you hadn't written about them I wouldn't have known they were drug logos even though I've lived around that drug culture for years I'm still pretty oblivious to it since I've never partaken. What does come though is a sense of damage, and of the repetitive actions that lead to that damage. That's a good start but not quite there.

The enormous Warhol "Mao" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is pretty awesome, in keeping with the aura of Mao, but so, too, are his multiple images of Mao in various incarnations. Then again Warhol really had it nailed in his early work than totally fucked up, creating the repetitive dreck only A.B. Rosen would think is art.